Ecommerce Rebuild: CRO & UX Design
Closer Pets had steady traffic, but a catalogue of complex product variants that the existing site failed to guide customers through: high time-to-product, and profitability capped by a browsing and checkout experience that hadn't kept pace with the catalogue's complexity. The brief was a performance-led UX overhaul of the end-to-end buying journey, from browse to checkout.
The brief
Closer Pets had steady traffic, but the existing site failed to guide customers through a catalogue of complex product variants. That showed up as a high time-to-product, and it was capping site-wide profitability. The brief was to re-engineer the end-to-end buying journey, from browse to checkout, under a performance-led UX overhaul.
The work
I redesigned the core product card into a single high-density component: key features, variants, reviews and stock status all in one place. That removed the need for duplicate listings for near-identical products and cut the decision fatigue of browsing a catalogue where every variant used to get its own card.
Alongside that, I ran a full visual and CTA hierarchy pass: standardising iconography, strengthening button affordance, and tightening whitespace so the primary path to purchase stayed visually dominant at every breakpoint. On product pages, I moved trust signals, USPs and finance information to sit directly against the call-to-action rather than lower down the page, so reassurance arrived exactly where hesitation was most likely rather than after the fact.
A colour-coded wayfinding system and a “soft-gate” pattern for more involved purchases rounded out the navigation and search improvements. All of it was driven by heuristic analysis alongside Hotjar and GA insights, not just intuition.
What shipped
A 31.2% increase in conversion rate and a 22% boost in checkout transitions, achieved while keeping average order value stable: genuine growth, not just a shift toward cheaper products.